Recently American Intelligence Media did a show questioning the legitimacy of these articles, featuring ex(?)-NSA ex(?)-Jesuit Douglas Gabriel, and tech entrepreneur Michael McKibben who claims to have invented a key technology of social media that was stolen by Facebook.

In this video they state that their research team had looked into every aspect of the Highlands Group that was available on the Internet in 2017 but at the time did not find Part 2 of Nafeez’s story. Their insinuation was that this was some sort of conspiracy, a #timephonehack to take credit for their work.

I remember when both articles came out in 2015, and can confirm that their publishing dates were real – if not at the same time, no more than 2 days apart at maximum. The Wayback Machine archived both articles on the same date, June 27 2015; but they were out months before then.

I shared the articles on two of my Facebook groups when they came out:

Bruce Damer went on the Joe Rogan Experience, published Oct 14 2014. I’m not sure if he mentioned the Highlands Group in this interview, but it has certainly been all over his web site for many years. This is a very revealing interview about Burning Man:

American Intelligence Media, aka AIM4truth, published a story about the Highlands Group on Feb 18, 2017:

Historical research is based on things that already happened, so “I reported it first” is a silly game to play in this context. Gabriel and McKibben do themselves and their “conclave” a disservice by not respecting and crediting Nafeez Ahmed’s amazing reporting. If AIM’s researchers really could not find this information when they looked in 2017 – when it is easily available from their own web site – this is a black mark against their team rather than against Dr Ahmed.

Joe, Vahid and I have more in common than decades in the tech industry: we have all recently been accused of being CIA agents by Jan Irvin. We talk about this and the wider problem in the alt-media of “everyone’s a shill” serving the divide-and-conquer agenda, which takes the focus away from real research.

Stafford Beer is one of my heroes, someone whose thinking I followed in my own companies. I look at the role he played in creating the Cybernet, which connected the entire Chilean economy and society to a Star Trek-like bridge in the Presidential Palace. The Cybernet disappeared after Allende died in a CIA-backed coup in 1973.